Also, thanks to Bill Martens and the WTB Collection for the Twilight II manual scan.

Lastly, thanks to some purchases of my own, the archive now includes both a working disk image and cover scan to Geographic Jigsaw by Micro Eclat and also Symbolix (also known as GSymbolix and Eureka Symbolix) by Henrik Gudat of Bright Software.

22/03/2009: IIGS Tune Treasure!

Jim Maricondo has done the Apple II community a wonderful service. Apart from being the brains behind the wonderful Twilight II screen saver and together with Bill Martens, the Golden Grail archive, he's also recorded a lot of high quality IIGS music from games, demos, SoundSmith and Noisetracker. Five hours worth in fact! And the music now resides with each relevant archive on this site, the link to which you can find under the 2image download link.

Firstly, there's the haunting opening music to Alien Mind. Perfect as a ringtone? Or perhaps you prefer Miami Software's remix on the Space Cluster title screen? Then there's also the unique title music to Neuromancer, written by none other than geek gods Devo! The perfect music to drive into the sunset to, the theme from Test Drive II, is also part of the collection. Or how about the thumping first two tracks of Space Fox? The theme from Skate or Die? The first three levels' music of Marble Madness? The title music of Columns GS by James Brookes? Two tracks from Sensei? And to finish off the games, there's the music from the first level of GATE and its very different sounding GATE playable demo.

Did you spend far too many hours marvelling at the compositions created with SoundSmith? Well now you can relive those days without a IIGS being on hand! I've also created an archive for NoiseTracker, because there's a few recorded tracks for that as well! There's also five Diversi-Tune tracks that you can now sing along to the MP3s of. And last but not least, I had originally forgotten to include Mitch Spector's recordings of three Music Construction Set tracks.

Speaking of which, Mitch's recordings have been on the site since the re-launch and if you missed them, here they are:

Even I've had a crack at recording music, and have the complete soundtrack to the Bard's Tale II, including all the songs from the original Bard's Tale as played by the Bard in the sequel.

If you're keen to record your favourite IIGS music and want to add to the collection here, equip your IIGS with a stereo card and see how you can help.

21/03/2009: IIGS Programming Alumni News

I was delighted that Dr Ken Franklin, author of the brilliant One Armed Battle, Plunder! and Milestones 2000 added to the comments to the blog entry regarding the upcoming coffee table book. Ken sent me the latest versions of his games (v1.51) which used better compression for the sound effects, also adding a couple of little options here and there. The 2image archives for the three games have been updated online, as has the hard drive image containing all the shareware games along with a complete install of System 6.0.1.

I had to ask Ken: was there another equally addictive game he was working on back in the early 90s? The answer is yes, but it didn't get past the preliminary stage. The game was to be called 'Monster Mash' and be a cross between Cootie and Memory Match. It sounds just as fun as the other games, but unfortunately we'll never know.

But not all is lost. Ken's hoping to develop iPhone/iPod Touch versions of his classic IIGS games in the next year or so. I can't think of a better platform for modern takes on these games!

Speaking of former IIGS developers and the iPhone, some big news in the past week is that Brian Greenstone, head of Pangea Software and mastermind behind IIGS games Xenocide, Senseless Violence, Cosmocade and his 24 hour shareware games, has announced that after working almost exclusively on the Mac for nearly the last 15 years, he's decided to put all his efforts into future projects for release on the iPhone only.

It's been interesting to see the response to this move. At worst, some feel betrayed that they have supported Pangea all these years in the hope continued support would always ensure new Mac games. It's not unlike the feelings that arose when developers started abandoning ship for the Apple II by the late 80s and early 90s. But I can't blame Brian for his decision; to develop games exclusively for the Mac is certainly an exercise in swimming up stream and when most of the hard work put into Pangea's games was translatable to iPhone games, which then netted Brian more rewards in the space of 9 months than the previous 14 years...you'd have to be a fool not to move on and continue to use the successful model of Apple's App Store to distribute your programs. Good luck to him!

21/02/2009: Big Content Additions!

I'm VERY happy with the many contributions that arrived during my holiday! It seems I was after most of these since I started the archive 10 years ago - much thanks to all concerned.

First of all, George Rentovich has sent along his combined archives by CD so I could poke around and see what this archive didn't have. George's stuff included most of the educational archives I had been after for a long time and they are now available for all as 2image archives:

Cartooners Space Art (now included with the existing Cartooners archive. Some really great and amusing new animations and characters, scenes, sound effects for your own productions)

Color n Canvas (a paint program for kids. Does anyone know if this came with a data disk with sample images?)

Electric Crayon (OK, so technically not a IIGS program, although this unofficial bundle of three Electric Crayon releases requires a IIGS to run)

Land of the Unicorn (a very challenging game for all ages testing your word vocabulary. I think I expanded my own just play testing it!)

Learning Spoken English (an unusual, possibly unreleased piece of software, that looks developed as part of a course to learn English. At its heart is the speech and graphics technology that powers all the First Byte educational programs.

Milliken Story Teller (although it's been part of the archive a while now, there are now three new stories for kids to enjoy: Aladdin & the Magic Lamp, Jack & the Bean Stalk, Peter Rabbit)

Once Upon a Time III (Annoyingly buggy story creator for kids and forces you only to ever use two disks at a time and unfortunately, can't be installed to hard drives)

Snoopy's Reading Machine (although the graphics have obviously been converted from a C64, Schultz's characters are nicely represented and should provide fun for kids and adults alike.)

Stars & Planets (an educational program that's hard to define for which genre it belongs to, it includes learning about the planets, but also how to improve memory and counting).

From George's archive, there are also several new application archives as well:

DeskPak (there are some terrific desk accessories here, that give the IIGS most of the functionality of Classic Mac OS desk accessories)

I'm also grateful for the combined effort of Jim Casselbury for scanning the boxes of Cavern Cobra (I never thought I'd ever see it!) and Strategic Conquest (which I've added to the archive, even though technically, it's not a native IIGS game. But the box says 'Apple IIGS Version') which were sold to Jim and lovingly stored away by its previous owner, Don. Also thanks to the sharp eyes of Andrew Roughan for pointing out Cavern Cobra and Strategic Conquest were seen on eBay!

Andy Molloy has sent in a scan for the Finder alternative/program launcher Wings and to cap it off Collin Douglas has provided a scan of Star Saga One, surely one of the rarest IIGS games ever.

Also, thanks to the eternal vigilance of Willie Yeo, Flash Boot has been added to the archive, which was previously missing.

In other news, if you think 'What is the Apple IIGS?' for a comprehensive repository of commercial IIGS software and information then think the same for 'Golden Grail' in regards to shareware and free software for the IIGS. Jim Maricondo and Bill Martens have completed their arduous work in compiling the Golden Orchid CD-ROM collection into 32meg 2images, just right for emulation. The archives are very nicely organised and contain original documentation where available as well as the latest versions of many useful and interesting freely distributable software, not to mention an extensive sound, graphics and music library.

Last but not least, a public service announcement: if you were wondering where the News had disappeared to, it actually hadn't. When the clock ticked over into 2009, that meant all 2008 news is only accessible via the '2008 News Archive' button in the right hand column of the News page.